So I am riding on an airplane, can’t remember exactly when, late 90′s early 2000′s and you are sitting next to a self professed successful small business owner. He spends the flight telling you about a pretty important decision he has to make about hiring someone. At the end of his discourse, I make the off hand remark and I guess somewhat impolitely since he had really laid out his dilemma, you really should pay her more money.
Seems like the right answer to this day, however, I really should have laid out why just paying her what he was going to was not enough.
A bit of the back story because he wasn’t a louse about this, he was in a position to do some good and thought he was trying. And this post will involve a discussion of “isms” soon. Yet to get started here is a bit of his situation. And yes I do remember this very well because he did hiss me off with some of his reasoning and the fact that later on, I realized I should have been more engaged with my answer.
He was looking to hire a young lady who was trying to come off welfare. And in case you do not know Texas, Texas doesn’t pay squat to those on welfare so any job is a major increase in income. And he was going to pay her significantly more than minimum wage at the time so he was not sure why she wouldn’t take the job. As a good Christian conservative he really thought he was making a fair offer. What he didn’t understand was there was much more of a trade off than just receiving more income. And at this time the media verbiage of “living wage” was not a buzzword, yet this was a living wage issue.
First of all a person needs to understand that young ladies with children on welfare in Texas do not receive much money at all. I do not know what it is now, but at the time we are talking only a few hundred dollars a month so going to 1600 or 2000 dollars a month might appear to be quite a bump.
What isn’t factored in when you make this transition from welfare to worker is the cost of living. A young lady on welfare usually does not have to pay for daycare, they receive food stamps, they usually do not have a car, and get around on minimal bus passes, so does she have to buy transportation if there are no bus routes to the job, gas and maintenance then?, food since she will become income ineligible for food stamps, health insurance for her and her children and even if the employer offers health insurance she has to pay her portion from her check, co-pays medicine etc...which while on welfare she receives various health subsidies for the children or in some cases complete medical coverage, she will probably be income ineligible for rent assistance and then there are miscellaneous expenses anyone that runs a household budget knows exists and can bite you at anytime.
A simple explanation and run of the numbers would have helped this person much more than my off hand comment, yet my comment was based on my knowledge of people on welfare’s situation. I was inadvertently withholding knowledge I had to help him make a better decision. A few years before this encounter I had a very strong indoctrination into the world of people on welfare and had started a Masters in Public Administration program and written some on the problem in our society of people on welfare, done some small research etc.. so my understanding of her predicament of having to choose more “income” versus a life she understood and took care of her and her children would have been beneficial to him.
She wasn’t trying to avoid work yet that is what he thought, she was trying to figure out if she could afford to work. He had given me some of her reasons and I had a good idea of what she was going through in the internal decision making process. She needed more money and she was smart enough to realize it. He had said she wanted the job so he just couldn’t understand why she wanted to commit.
So this is small micro example of what people are really looking at when we think about a living wage in today’s world.
And for both sides there was a “good” being developed. I could see the programs in my head she must have applied to get to the point where she could get off welfare if the circumstances were right and here he was trying to help her become self sufficient. His goal was admirable and again I should I have realized that at the moment and tried to open his eyes a bit. She didn’t get there by happenstance and had worked through some steps to get to the point where she could get a job, maybe GED, maybe training programs through the Workforce offices, venturing out into an unknown and alien world to her, relying on people telling her she had to do this and had to that, not something that happens overnight. And he was willing to take a chance on a young lady with to him a questionable past and no work history. Overall this should be a success story, both for socialism and capitalism. Well, quite frankly welfare isn’t socialism it just has some socialist programs, but his company was capitalism and he was doing what I complain very little people do and that is find the balance of making money and respecting the people who help you make the money. So I failed him and her and it has been a nagging thought ever since.
And again the above is the micro example and you can flesh out the numbers yourself and see how much she might have truly needed, but the low $20,000 was not enough even in the late 90′s.
The macro though is a living wage for society in general and that encompasses quite a bit. I am not talking about each person in society having a living wage that is a different type of macro, I am talking about a living wage for society which includes everything from taxes to economic development to social security (again that socialism to hard right hacks) to education to national debt to a whole myriad aspect of what it means for a country to be successful economically. The micro example has to be understood to be able to understand what is needed to develop a living wage for society though.
What are the costs of childcare in general, education in general, retirement in general, health care in general, the ability to be upwardly mobile (God, when was the last time you heard that phrase, but it is still important), government spending in general, government taxation in general, investment in local government, investment in the local business structure, defense, and the list goes on.
Yet, we need to understand what is the balance needed in society for a society to have a living wage or even the better goal of the society thriving.
I always want to offer solutions when I bring up a topic where there are problems. Anyone can complain, yet the solutions are not one stop, each item from the list above affects other items on the list in different ways. I have written individually on some topics from that list including a better social security/taxation policy, education policy, etc.. so I am not going to try and rehash a list of posts instead approach the topic with what I consider one of our biggest problems and that is we do not look at the whole above.
We have been so dominated by one solution thinking we have a patch work of laws and regulations that does not address the broad picture and hinders us from being able to find real solutions to a successful living wage at the societal level. Just like the woman above who has to consider a plethora of individual costs that add up to whether or not she can take the job, we as a society need to start looking at this same overwhelming list and start looking at how they interact with each other. She can make a one time decision, is the money enough. We cannot. Again a simple off hand comment, and again I stand by it.
And each new law only aggravates the real problem. This isn’t a quilt where different patches make a pretty whole. No, there needs to be a cohesive thread developed that when you add something it follows the same pattern. And of course the current political discourse is making this even more difficult to achieve much less have a constructive dialogue about it.
I briefly mentioned the two big “isms” in American dialogue right now, socialism and capitalism. Neither works by itself and both if left to its own devices and supporters in and of itself have a negative affect on the society.
Success needs a structured balance of competing forces. The micro example touches a bit on the interplay, both people were coming from good intentions, yet the big picture wasn’t clear enough to both of them for both their goals to work. She needed more money, but didn’t understand there were going to need to be more sacrifices for her to work through this change. He needed to realize she had to meet certain obligations in making this transition that were probably foreign to him. If only today we had their problems in developing a living wage for society. Now we have to work just to get back to that point.
We need to change the dialogue about many topics in this country, and the idea that a living wage is broken down to a dollar figure is one that needs a complete overhaul. The world is never that simple.
And on a side note of one of our living wage issues, maybe we should reduce student debt by a percentage rather than a single dollar figure. I have also introduced in prior posts a different way to offer student loans going forward than the current system that created this disaster. For now, reducing the debt by a percentage also might be a bit fairer when applied across the board to everyone.
Cheers all
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